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At least 28 people, including many children, were massacred in Egypt on Friday when gunmen ambushed groups of Egyptian Christians traveling along a desert road towards a remote monastery.

The killers lay in wait in the desert outside the city of Minya and slaughtered the occupants of at three different vehicles as they drove towards the monastery of St Samuel the Confessor.

The masked gunmen sprayed bullets into a minibus carrying children from a church group, killing at least six of them, according to Egyptian media. Christian activists said the attackers also boarded a bus and killed the men before robbing the women of their jewelry and phones and leaving Islamist leaflets among the bodies.

Egypt’s interior ministry said 28 people were murdered in total but church officials said they believed the actual death toll may be significantly higher. Another 22 people were wounded.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the massacre but suspicion will fall on the Egyptian arm of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), which has carried out a series of bloody attacks against Christians in the last year.

Suicide bombers killed dozens in a series of strikes on churches in April and December and hundreds of Christians fled the Sinai in March after Isil began a campaign of targeting killings against them.

Egypt is home to around nine million Christians - around 10 per cent of of the total population - and analysts believe that Isil is targeting them partly out of religious hatred but also in an effort to foment sectarian tensions in Egypt.

"Groups like Isil have made it an objective to exploit longstanding tensions between the Muslim community and the Christian minority,” said Zack Goldsmith, an analyst with the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri centre.

The attacks took place near Minya, around 140 miles south of Cairo, early on Friday morning at the beginning of the Egyptian weekend.

The gunmen travelled into the desert in a group of pick-up trucks and reportedly ambushed at least three different vehicles in quick succession before fleeing. Police set up checkpoints along the road after the attack and said they were hunting for the killers.

One of the vehicles attacked was a minibus carrying a group of children from the Church of the Virgin in Bani Sweif, a province north of Minya.

"They opened fire randomly on all of its passengers. Many children are among the dead,” said Mikhail Ayoub, a Coptic church official. A two-year-old and a four-year-old were reportedly killed.

Egyptian media published photographs of three young boys who survived the attack, showing them wide-eyed with shock and covered in what may have been blood. One young boy still clung to his dead mother’s handbag.

"We are trying to calm them down. A girl has lost her parents and aunt. Another child, in front of me now, holds his mother's hand bag and doesn't know yet that she is dead,” Mr Ayoub said,

Many members of one family were killed on a bus as they travelled from their home village to a baptism at the monastery, Nabil Kamel Abdel Shahid, the bus owner, told The Telegraph.

Mr Shahid drove to the scene on a motorcycle shortly after the attack to find the bus riddled with bullets and carnage all around. “It was a horrible scene, the heads of some people were destroyed and their brains were out. Others were lying dead inside and outside the bus, on the side of the road and under the bus,” he said.

One woman who was wounded on the bus said the killers wore outfits “like military uniforms” and had their faces covered.

The gunmen also attacked a truck carrying workers who were heading to the monastery. At least eight workers were reportedly killed.

To reach the monastery, visitors must leave the major motorway that runs along the Nile and drive west for around nine miles along a desert road. The killers laid their ambush around ten minutes from the motorway.

The monastery is named after St Samuel, a seventh-century Coptic monk who was tortured by the Byzantines and the Berbers for his Christian faith.

Donald Trump and Pope Francis discussed the persecution of Christians in the Middle East during their first meeting at the Vatican this week. The Pope visited Egypt last month in a show of solidarity with the country’s Christian minority.

The Egyptian president also vowed to continue striking bases used to train militants irrespective of their location. "We will not hesitate to protect our people from the evil," he said in a televised speech on Friday.